October 18, 2018

Oh Lordy Lordy - Open Thread

There is too much sh1t goin' on. Can we go back to the good old days of no drama? Pls thx bai?

Whatever.

Go Sox, tho' I wouldn't mind a Brewers World Series victory (wait, did I just talk about baseball? Don't tell the Count).

If Dems take the House you will see a lame duck session the likes of which even god has never seen. Deliberation over judicial nominations? we don't need no stinkin' deliberation over judicial nominations. But that's the Senate so what do I know?

Comments

Sorry, this is a bit late, but didn't finish it before I fell asleep.

Hey Nigel, sorry I missed Loofbourow when you posted it, I saw it on LGM as well. I agree that it does speak to a number of things that we talk about here, but it seems to be very difficult to talk about anger. Loofbourow is right to identify how women and minorities are basically prohibited from expressing anger and it is not hard to see how it will loom larger and larger in the coming months. She's also right to talk about how anger is deployed and how it will probably end up hurting women and minorities more than it will hurt the privileged. But I think she's wrong in saying that we really only celebrate anger when the angry person gets away with it.. We actually don't. We celebrate it when the person we perceive as the bully gets their comeuppance. The problem is that many things, like political correctness, Women's and LGBT rights, Black Lives Matter, people protesting the separation of parents and children, are cast as the 'bullying' and The Plain Folk of the US of A are simply restoring the natural order of things. I'm not sure how to get out of that, except to point out that these things aren't bullying, but when you try, you get told that no, the reporter was shoving a mike in Gianforte's face, or Kavanaugh had every right to get angry when falsely accused.

So I'm left with the impression that cleek points to, that this isn't what people really are. But if you live in a community with little contact the targets of Trump and the Republican party's attacks, it's easy to lose sight of it and to claim 'they' are the ones that are bullying and 'we' are the ones that are being bullied. At that point, it becomes easy to cling to reasons, not matter how tenuous, for the treatment and things only change when the 'others' express their anger, as Loofboirow suggests will happen, which then allows the tut tutting.

I've done forecasting and predictions most of my adult life, some longish term. I've always liked Amarillo Slim's "Bet or shut up" attitude on backing them. One of these days I have to look into how to set up some sort of future "drop" in case I have to pay off -- one of them we won't know if I lose until 2039.

if you live in a community with little contact the targets of Trump and the Republican party's attacks, it's easy to lose sight of it and to claim 'they' are the ones that are bullying and 'we' are the ones that are being bullied.

Which is why the strongholds of xenophobia in the US are precisely the areas which have the smallest numbers of immigrants. It's not fear of immigrants we are seeing so much as fear of the unknown.

Which is why the strongholds of xenophobia in the US are precisely the areas which have the smallest numbers of immigrants.

As it happens, I spent several years of my childhood in Steve King country in Iowa (in the same town where he was born). When I was a kid there, I was in the minority -- a short brown-eyed brown-haired Anglo-Saxon kid among all the damned blond blue-eyed vikings*. I wasn't just the shortest boy in my grade school and junior high classes -- I was shorter than most of the girls, too.

Last I checked, the town's population was 25% Hispanic. Over Steve King's lifetime, there has been a huge shift in ethnic makeup.

* I was in a play with one of the Lund sisters, and at her request, walked her home after a late rehearsal. Her pure-Danish grandmother was there visiting and insisted that I come in and talk with her. The Lund sister told me the next day that her grandother's opinion after I left was, "Well, he seems nice enough, but he's so dark." The Lund sister thought it was hilarious and wanted to go to a movie on Friday just so I could piss her grandmother off again.

And work the packing plant floor, where they paid a living wage when I was a kid (the decline largely due to the local owner selling out to a national corporation). And the vegetable canning/freezing plant, which was a second seasonal income for the families whose main income was from the packing plant.

Not taking any position here except that in the case of Steve King, whom I have zero sympathy for, the claim that "areas which have the smallest numbers of immigrants" doesn't seem to apply. NW Iowa has had, in percentage terms, a quite large influx of immigrants.

I dunno, I'm more conservative, but that is real conservatism, not this reactionary conservatism that masquerades as conservative in the US. You realize how hard it is to get to a place, to reach a point in your life where you know enough to get things done etc. etc.

Of course, I teach at a university and surrounded by fresh crops of young people, often trying to tell them that Rome wasn't built in a day, so I think I come by it naturally...

Well, conservatives like to boast how much more 'realistic' they are then liberals.

But there is also what wj points out, which is

...the world, irritatingly, persists in changing around you.

The conservative urge (the real one, not the bs one of pissing on whatever liberals want) is a desire to slow down or at least manage that change, seems to me. But if I say stuff like that, I'm going to start sounding like wj...;^)

I'm 63, and (as they say in the analyses of opinion polls) broken down by age and sex (joke). It's been a really awful last 12 months for me, and even longer if you count Trump and Brexit. Hoping and wishing very hard for the midterms, y'all.

And thank you, Nigel. So rather than a long drawn-out, Goreyesque series of unspoken horrors, I will merely say that my husband died last November, the awful ramifications of which continue, and my mother died two days ago. So that's quite enough of that for the moment. ObWi has very often been a solace, FWIW. So there's that.

"Mrs. Clinton, it's your party, forgive me, that is encouraging this kind of thing. It is the Democrat Party that's home to all of these mobs. It's the Democrat Party -- Mrs. Clinton herself who said that being uncivil at this point in time is entirely proper and understandable. It's -- the time to go back to civility will be after the Democrats win. You've got bought and paid for operatives by Mrs. Clinton money showing up at Trump rallies trying to make them look like deranged Trump supporters. The Democrats are even paying people to draw swastikas on American flags and waving them around, made to look like deranged, lunatic Trump supporters. And so, in the midst of this atmosphere, we have this series of bombs that were supposedly sent today, exclusively to Democrats. And it just -- there's a smell test that this stuff has to pass, and, so far, a lot of people's noses are in the air, not quite certain of what to make of this. This is just -- it's not Republicans that show up, for example, at the offices of the Family -- what is it, some pro-life group's offices, some guy shows up with a gun and was going to shoot people, got caught before he was able to shoot anyone, Family Research Center (sic) I think, yeah. Republicans just don't do this kind of thing. Even though every event, like mass shootings, remember, every mass shooting there is, the Democrats in the media try to make everybody think right off the bat that some tea partier did it, or some talk radio fan did it, or some Fox News viewer did it. Turns out, it's never, ever the case. Not one of these bombs went off. And if a Democrat operative's purpose here is to make it look like, hey, you know, there are mobs everywhere, the mobs are not just Democrat mobs. I mean, look at this, you've got people here trying to harm CNN, and Obama, and Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Debbie blabbermouth Schultz. It just -- it might serve a purpose here."

Remember early on when Kushner was trying to set up a "back-channel" to the Kremlin? Well I suppose it's less adequate when it's one way, but it appears a solution has been found. At least it avoids the hassle of trips to the Russian embassy.

wj, it turns out the listeners learn nothing because the listened-in-on doesn't know shit from Sherlock:

"White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them….They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities."

They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities."

It really is a heck of a commentary that his own staff would say something like that. And expect it to be believed!

My condolences to GFTNC, I don't have anything good to say about losing family, I'm unfortunately more familiar with that than I would wish. I'm 54, to provide another demographic data point about the lurkertariat here.

They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.